Project Ozma

The 85-foot Howard E. Tatel Radio Telescope at Green Bank used in Project Ozma.

Project Ozma was the first systematic attempt to detect artificial radio signals from nearby
stars. Named after the princess in Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, it
was the brainchild of American radio astronomer Frank Drake working at the Green Bank observatory
in West Virginia. Drake began preparations for Ozma in 1959, the same year
in which the seminal theoretical paper on SETI by Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi was published in the British journal Nature (see Morrison-Cocconi
Conjecture). These developments, although occurring more or less simultaneously
(the paper appeared about 6 months after Drake began his work), were quite
independent of one another. Both, however, concluded that the best chance
of success would come from searching at a radio wavelength of 21.1 centimeters (corresponding
to a frequency of 1,420 megahertz) since the 21-centimeter
line of neutral hydrogen in the Galaxy might represent a natural hailing
wavelength at which intelligent species would try to communicate. As his
target, Drake chose two nearby, reasonably Sun-like stars, Epsilon
Eridani and Tau Ceti. From April to
July 1960, he tuned into both for six hours a day, using the 85-foot Howard
E. Tatel radio telescope at Green Bank
(shown in the photo) equipped with a receiver that had just a single channel
and a bandwidth of only 100 Hz. Although
after 150 hours of listening Ozma drew a blank, it was to be the starting
point for many more, increasingly sophisticated searches which continue
to this day.1, 2